Two British journalists that question the mainstream narrative on Syria

For
the past few weeks, British news-papers have been informing their
readers about two contrasting battles in the killing grounds of the
Middle East. One is Mosul, in northern Iraq, where western reporters
are accompanying an army of liberation as it frees a joyful
population from terrorist control. The other concerns Aleppo, just a
few hundred miles to the west. This, apparently, is the exact
opposite. Here, a murderous dictator, hellbent on destruction, is
waging war on his own people.

Both
these narratives contain strong elements of truth. There is no
question that President Assad and his Russian allies have committed
war crimes, and we can all agree that Mosul will be far better off
without Isis. Nevertheless, the situations in Mosul and Aleppo are
fundamentally identical. In both cases, forces loyal to an
internationally recognised government are attacking well-populated
cities, with the aid of foreign air power. These cities are under the
control of armed groups or terrorists, who are holding a proportion
of their population hostage.

In
Mosul, fewer than 10,000 Isis fighters control about a million
people. In eastern Aleppo, it is estimated that about 5,000 armed
men, the majority linked to al–Qaeda, dominate a population of
about 200,000. In each case the armed groups use the zones they
occupy to attack government areas with rockets, mortars and other
weapons.

So
Prime Minister al-Abadi in Iraq and President Assad in Syria face the
same dilemma. Should they do nothing for fear of killing civilians?
Or do they take air action and eliminate the so-called rebels, but at
terrible cost in innocent blood as they wage merciless war against
ruthless insurgents?

In
both cases, enormous bloodshed could be prevented if the terrorist
groups let the civilian population leave. Last month the UN special
envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, pleaded with Jabhat Fateh al-Sham
(formerly al-Qaeda, but now decoupled and rebranded) to do just that:
‘One thousand of you are deciding the destiny of 270,000
civilians.’ He pointedly used the word ‘hostage’ to describe
the way these civilians were being held by the rebels and not by
Assad

This
episode highlighted the double standard about western reporting of
these terrible problems. In Mosul, western reporters travelling with
the invading Iraqi army publish pictures of joyful populations
liberated from the jihadists. In Aleppo, the attempt to free the city
from al-Qaeda control is portrayed as a remorseless attack on the
civilian population.

Assad
and his allies have carried out war crimes. But that is not the whole
story. When I visited the government-held areas of Aleppo earlier
this year, I met scores of people who had fled for their lives from
al–Qaeda or Isis in the east of the city. They told me hideous
stories of how these jihadists, very few of whom were Syrian, had
enforced a brutal form of sharia law, abolished education in schools
and forced women to wear burkas and stay at home.

In
western Aleppo, I found a woman in a government building where she
had come to collect her salary as a teacher (government employees in
rebel-held areas are still paid by the regime, even though they are
no longer allowed to work). She told me how she was preparing to
return home to rejoin her husband and children. She had no doubt at
all what fate awaited her: ‘The fighters are preparing ambushes
with explosives. They are moving their wives and families out. They
are keeping us as human shields.’

Western
reports about the fighting in Mosul have made much of the liberated
churches. Yet exactly the same narrative applies across Syria. Two
years ago I joined Syrian government forces as they freed the eastern
city of Maaloula (where Aramaic, the language of Christ, is still
spoken). The famous monastery above the town had been dreadfully
desecrated by al-Qaeda. In Aleppo, the Christian community has
collapsed from 200,000 before the war to maybe 25,000 today. This is
because Christians in Aleppo know that if the British and US-backed
jihadists in the east win the war, they will be slaughtered.

A
further double standard concerns the reporting of Russian and Syrian
atrocities. Much has — rightly — been made of the so-called
barrel bombs dropped on Aleppo by the Russians. Yet rebel commanders
in eastern Aleppo use equally hideous weapons. Last April, fighters
from Jaish al-Islam, backed by Saudi Arabia and considered moderate
enough that American diplomats retain relations with them, admitted
to using chemical weapons against the Kurds in Aleppo. This attack
received almost no attention from the media, and failed to generate
the faintest outrage in Britain.

Jaish
al-Islam employ a so-called ‘hell cannon’ to fire gas canisters
and shrapnel weighing up to 40 kilograms into civilian areas. These
are every bit as murderous as the barrel bombs. Reports in the
western press have suggested that hell cannons are examples of the
engineering ingenuity of plucky rebels. Few journalists have dwelled
on the fact that these improvised weapons have been deliberately used
to kill hundreds of Aleppo civilians.

Yet
another double standard applies to the destruction of hospitals. When
I was in Aleppo, I interviewed Mohamad El-Hazouri, head of the
department of health, at the Razi hospital. He told me that when
rebel groups entered the city they put six of the 16 hospitals out of
service, as well as 100 of the 201 health centres, and wiped out the
ambulance service.

An
Aleppo eye hospital, which had been one of the greatest treatment
centres in northern Syria, had been turned into a jail for detainees
by the rebels. He said that his workers went to great lengths to
supply hospitals in the rebel areas. Often they were rebuffed.

There
is a wider pattern at work here. When opponents of the West try to
reclaim urban areas from terrorists, they are denounced. When our
allies do the same — think of Israel in Gaza or the Saudis in Yemen
— we defend them. We judge Assad by one set of rules, and ourselves
and our own allies by another.

This
is why everything you’ve read about the wars in Syria and Iraq
could be wrong

It is
too dangerous for journalists to operate in rebel-held areas of
Aleppo and Mosul. But there is a tremendous hunger for news from the
Middle East, so the temptation is for the media give credence to
information they get second hand

Patrick Coburn

the
Independent,

14
December, 2016

The
Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east
Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary
allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300
civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and
bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some
600 civilian dead over a month.

Despite
these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these
two sieges is radically different.

In
Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its
indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi
army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is
accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be
used as human shields.

Contrast
this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of
President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians
regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of
humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the
rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but
unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.

One
factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar,
and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the
Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are
no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for
the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while
Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is
only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom.

These
are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a
whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000
fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar
al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.

Experience
shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives
even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But,
strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their
trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the
control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They
would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan
activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in
east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.

It
is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in
wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others,
information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The
fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be
spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.

For
instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses
almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as
the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the
10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.

None
of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the
US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed
threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this
thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who
predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.

Some
of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise
the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to
expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives
to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting
the Americans to do so for them.

Much
the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the
2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

Atrocity
stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were
subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations,
were rapidly promoted to lead the news, however partial the source.

The
Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various
al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within
opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from
just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to
information they get second hand from people who could in practice
only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant
jihadi opposition groups.

It
is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the
truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of
information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters
learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting
some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic
infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.

A
word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it
is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that
decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be
dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is
not much they can do about it.

Thus,
in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories
casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the
newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and
was a threat to the world.

Journalists
and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq
with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of
Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to
Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said
that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian
people came second, third or not at all”.

The
quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the
New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best
informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet
published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations
for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the
agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the
intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.

Overall,
government experts did better than journalists, who bought into
simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was
always on the verge of being overthrown.

Phillips
records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011,
when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the
long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that
“Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of
the population.”

The
French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to
receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your
information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will
fall.”